Purple prose
Early on, most writers learn to avoid loading down their writing with adjectives, trying instead to connect those bare nouns with verbs that do some work. It’s a good rule, but not unbreakable.
The expression ‘purple prose’ always reminds me of a paragraph from Blue Highways in which William Least Heat-Moon Trogdon uses four adjectives in the first seven words, the sixth of them, coincidentally, a synonym for ‘purple.’
If you think Blue Highways is a travel book, think again. Or redefine the word ‘travel.’ Blue Highways is a long poem about America that doesn’t look like poetry until you read it and realize that the better prose and poetry are written, the narrower is the gap between them. But it does travel. The paragraph I remember, set in a trading post in Tuba City, Ariz., during a sandstorm, starts in the 19th century and ends in outer space, all in fewer than 200 words:
In viridescent velveteen blouses and violescent nineteenth-century skirts, Navajo women of ample body, each laden with silver and turquoise bracelets, necklaces and rings — not the trading post variety but heavy bands gleaming under the patina of long wear — reeled off yards of fabric. The children, like schoolkids anywhere, milled around the candy; they spoke only English. But the old men, now standing at the plate glass window and looking into the brown wind, popped and puffed out the ancient words. I’ve read that Navajo, a language related to that of the Indians of Alaska and northwest Canada, has no curse words unless you consider ‘coyote’ cursing. By comparison with other native tongues, it’s remarkably free of English and Spanish; a Navajo mechanic, for example, has more than two hundred purely Navajo terms to describe automobile parts. And it might be Navajo that will greet the first extraterrestrial ears to hear from planet Earth: on board each Voyager spacecraft traveling toward the edge of the solar system and beyond is a gold-plated, long-playing record; following an aria from Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is a Navajo night chant, music the conquistadors heard.
So purple prose isn’t always a bad idea. But we’d better be really, really good at it. And judging from the fact that Trogdon spent four years rewriting Blue Highways, producing what a friend described as “a pile of manuscripts almost as tall as he is,” we’d better work at it really, really hard.
– Sid Leavitt
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